Alaric stood on the central plaza—a perfect octagon where eight streets converged without a single traffic jam—and handed his liege a final report. The town of 10,000 was complete in eleven years, not a generation.
For weeks, his layout was chaos. The fishmongers were too far from the harbor, so the catch rotted. The charcoal burners smoked out the weavers’ looms, turning linen grey. And the great ox-drawn waterwheel sat on the river’s slow bend, its buckets lifting half the water of a faster eddy fifty yards upstream. Alaric’s workers spent more time walking between misplaced buildings than actually building. anno 1404 efficient building layouts
The Margrave stared at the numbers, then at the humming city. “How did you know where to put everything?” Alaric stood on the central plaza—a perfect octagon
His liege, the Margrave of Westgard, had demanded a city of ten thousand souls within a single generation. Alaric had the stone, the wood, and the royal charter. What he lacked was a way to fit a cathedral district, a spice bazaar, and a ropewalk into a peninsula no wider than a longship’s keel. The fishmongers were too far from the harbor,
Word spread. Merchants arrived with foreign blueprints: a Moorish pattern for interlocking market stalls that allowed three times the foot traffic; a Hanseatic formula for spacing breweries so that each drew from its own well without depleting the neighbor’s; a Venetian secret of stacking ropewalks on a gentle slope so gravity fed the finished coil directly onto a waiting cog.
But the true stroke of genius came when he laid out the monastery gardens. The abbey demanded privacy, but the Margrave demanded tax revenue. Alaric wrapped the cloister in a U-shaped arc of herb gardens, apiaries, and a press house for olive oil. The open end of the U faced the harbor wind, which carried away the scent of tannin from the leatherworks just beyond the monastery wall—close enough for monks to bless the hides, far enough to keep the prayer books from stinking.